WORN BY
Bent Van Looy
Photographed by Charlie De Keersmaecker
I’m not sure Brussels is a real place. At the same time, Brussels is everywhere. Perhaps it's a place that only exists in our minds, an imaginary Brussels that means something different to everyone.
What I do know is that Brussels is big. And Brussels is many things.
There is the historic hamlet of Broekzele, laboriously built in times long past on marshy ground between small rivers. Miserable streams called Zenne or Maalbeek, whose murky waters were collected by alchemists in vats, barrels and basins where, mixed with hop blossoms and kissed by wild yeasts, they would turn into sour, cold beer.
There is also the Brussels of Leopold II, murderer and King of the Belgians, who forged ostentatious palaces, granite galleries and marble mausoleums out of shiploads of gold that came from the rubber and blood of the Congo, giving our marshy hamlet the allure of a metropolis.
And what about the Brussels of Brel, a brightly lit tavern where the Brussels bourgeoisie is living it up, condemned to an eternal polonaise between aspiration and shame?
The freshly baked pistolets on the terraces of the Vossenplein have never cracked like they did then, between the teeth of barely sobered up taxi drivers, on Sundays mornings at the flea market. Before dawn, the fully loaded handcarts thunder onto the cobblestones.The Empire clock, which has lost almost all its shine, is polished up with a little spit, given a place of honour on the mantelpiece above some coal stove, transforming a draughty attic in Ixelles into a warm and comfortable room overlooking Rue de Rivoli or The Strand.Quick and Flupke, the mischievous scoundrels from Hergé's books, laugh themselves silly at the local policeman, clumsily wriggling his way out of a sewer opening, his beer gut stuck somewhere between the paving stones and the sewer sludge.
Brussels, like that poor policeman, is in a constant limbo.
Brussels is the centre of power, an abstract term, a Brussels in quotation marks, with its postmodern jungle in which legions of officials in steel and glass behemoths try to keep the cumbersome wheels of NATO and the EU turning. Brussels is the tinsel-covered, plane tree-lined runway called Avenue Louise, where the super-rich are dressed by couturiers and luxury houses, and the leafy avenues where expats trot along behind Irish setters on their way to tennis practice.
But Brussels is also an ungovernable and inextricable tangle of languages, communities and misunderstandings. Toddlers have to share the slide in the park with drugdealers, who like to hide their plastic baggies there. A zebra crossing is only painted on half of the street, and forming a city council proves to be just as complicated as the rusty scaffolding that has been obscuring the gigantic courthouse from view for over forty years.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this state of limbo, Brussels is a city like no other.
The gentrification that has transformed Amsterdam, Berlin and Barcelona into one-dimensional wastelands of monoculture has not yet got its claws into Brussels. Stubborn and rebellious, Brussels remains a place where anything is possible. The intermediate zone has proved to be an extremely fertile breeding ground for fresh ideas, clear street language and radical artistic experiments. And so, a gorgeous explosion of multicoloured weeds thrives between the palaces of glass and steel, the hip hybrid patois of world-famous rappers arises from the eternal language struggle between Flemish and French speakers, and the pigeons are stuffed with the best fries in the world.
Beneath those layers of marble, granite and crumbling asbestos, almost muffled by the hum of the endless traffic jams and the shrieks of the metro tracks, somewhere in the soft mud of the Broekzeelse marsh I can hear a glorious heartbeat, rowdy and proud. It is the sound of Brussels.
